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[coldsync-hackers] address and datebook conduits.
Hi Fred,
Thanks for posting your conduits! They compiled essentially out of
the box on my MacOS X machine -- I only had to provide the
palm_errorno variable explicitly in palmdb.cc, because the Apple
linker doesn't seem to find it in coldsync's libpconn.a. I've seen
this problem before in building other software with global variables
in libraries, so it wasn't that big of a deal.
Incidentally, it was great to see some conduits written in something
other than perl. I'm not quite up to speed on it yet, so reading
examples are pretty hard for me.
Actually, I was most intrigued by your stuff because you mentioned
Emacs. Over time, I've moved to using Emacs for as much as possible,
because I'm more productive that way. While the Palm is great for
having my information on hand while away from a desktop, I'd really
prefer to enter most of that data using Emacs. I was wondering if you
use any specific elisp programs or ~/.emacs settings to make editing
the textfiles output by your conduits any easier.
More broadly, I'm wondering if you'd consider modifying the text
formats to be more along the lines of the standard Emacs formats. For
example, your datebook format seems pretty close to the Emacs diary
format, which would allow one to take advantage of entry via the Emacs
calendar. Any thoughts on how difficult it would be to modify the
format, or translate via a perl script? I'm not looking for a
one-to-one mapping between the Palm and Emacs diary (it doesn't seem
possible anyway), but if I could get 85% of the functionality it would
be fantastic.
For what it's worth, I've seen numerous postings (10-20, not 1000's,
not *yet* anyway) on various newsgroups by people wanting to sync
between Emacs (bbdb, memos, diary, etc.) and their Palms. My general
impression in skimming those messages is that it's hard to do things
within Emacs itself because there is no PDB reading routines in elisp,
and relatively few people are elisp hackers. So the elisp routines
that are out there are all one direction (Emacs to Palm) and usually
utilize pilot-link. The guys writing coldsync seem to have more of an
eye toward syncronization in both directions, and their documentation
seems better to me. I'd really like to get more connectivity between
Emacs and my Palm, and coldsync seems to be the way to go, but after
reading a bunch of stuff I think I need a bit of help and guidance.
For example, I have a few ideas about how one could glue together
various pieces of code from other projects, e.g., SyncBBDB perl code,
BBDB perl library, your conduits, etc. to get something going, but
patching together lots of different pieces of packages seems like it
might get tricky. On the other hand, designing all the conduits
myself would take me forever.
If you, and other folks from this list, might be interested in teaming
up to make more of this a reality, I'd be happy to join in. It would
probably take me a little while to get up to speed, but I think I
could contribute at some point.
Cheers,
Nick
+- J. Nicholas Laneman -----------------+--------------------------+
| MIT Digital Signal Processing Group | EMAIL: jnl@dsp.mit.edu |
| 50 Vassar Street, Room 36-683 | PHONE: (617) 253-2121 |
| Cambridge, MA 02139 | FAX: (617) 253-8495 |
+---------------------------------------+--------------------------+
Fred Gylys-Colwell writes:
> Hello all,
>
> I have written some conduits for the address database and the datebook
> database. They are written in C++, and require the coldsync libraries
> libpdb.a and libpconn.a.
>
> You can find them at <http://www.ktb.net/~fredgc/palm/index.html>.
>
>
> These are really just hacks to play around with how syncing works. If
> you try them out, you should back up your data regularly, and you
> should check every now and then to make sure nothing is corrupted.
>
>
> I made no attempt to use an existing text file format. I choose formats that
> were easy to write conduits for, which contained everything that was in the
> palm database, and could easily be read and edited with emacs. In particular,
> the address record matches the emacs regular expression "%[^%]*%", so it can be
> sorted with out too much trouble.
>
>
> I would be flattered if someone were inspired by this code and wrote a
> much better version, or barring that, sends me suggestions or patches.
>
>
> Can someone give advice or pointers to testing conduits? I would
> like to use pose, so that I won't mess up my own address book, but I
> have not yet tried it. Is it easy? Should I look out for something?
> I would like to automate my tests as much as possible.
>
>
> -- Fred GC.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Fred Gylys-Colwell fredgc@member.ams.org
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